Join us for lunch and a discussion with Viola Bao. Viola, a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literary Studies, will present her work on the political and poetic histories of Asian and African diasporas. Her research draws draws on Marxist frameworks of political economy and uneven development, aesthetic theory, and decolonial thought to explore ideas of cultural revolution and cultivation via the global circulation of Third Worldist thought. Her dissertation traces engagements with Mao's concept of a "people's aesthetic" across a variety of minoritarian genres, exploring how it catalyzed formal innovations that unsettled established divisions of labor between artist and audience and generated experiments in polyphonic narrative forms.
Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs
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